A Friend Of A Friend
I never met Vic Chesnutt. I only saw him play once, and it was a wrong venue/wrong crowd/wrong night kind of show. I didn’t have any true connection to his music, but understood just how important it was by the way other people talked about it.
Vic was a friend of a friend.
A few days before Christmas, as Taryn and I were planning out our three year old daughter’s first real Christmas I heard that he was in trouble. In the hospital. In a coma. Probably not coming back. I asked Billy to keep me posted, because I knew it was hurting Kristin. He said he would and I went back to forging notes from Santa and spending time with my family.
On Christmas day I got a call that Vic had died. Billy and Kristin wanted to help and thought it would be a good idea to set up a page that could collect money for Tina, Vic’s wife. It was the middle of a holiday, I still had never met Vic, still had only seen him play once, and still wasn’t connected to his music. I said the only thing I could: “Of course I’ll help.” It was the only right thing to say, because somewhere in Georgia everything just changed. One life ended and a family changed forever. There’s a house that used to have Vic in it that needs to find a way to continue without him.
It costs a lot of money to bury a man. The mortgage and bills need to be paid, food bought, and all the things that keep parting us from our money are still there. Except Vic’s not. People are talking about medical expenses. That may be a huge factor, I honestly have no idea how that debt does or does not pass on. But I do know the pain of losing someone in your family, in your house. If there was something I could do to help make sure that pain isn’t compounded by gross financial burden I was damn sure going to do it. I know I hope someone would do the same for Taryn and the girls were I to die.
So on Christmas I found a half hour to put up a page to help the family of a friend of a friend. Kristin did all the hard work writing and Billy pulled everything together. Since then a thousand people have given something to the family. Seeing so many people pull together to make sure that Vic’s family doesn’t need to suffer any more than they already had is about as close to a miracle as I’ll ever recognize.
And on one final point I want to be very clear: we didn’t do this to raise money for a hospital. We’re raising money for a family. Every donation is being accounted for and all the money will go directly to Vic’s wife and dealt with exactly as she specifies.
You can leave a donation for Vic’s family here.
